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Performance Review Time is Here Again!

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Many of the managers I know hate this time of year. Because it is not just Christmas that is coming into season.

It is also that time of the year when thoughts turn to performance reviews and annual appraisals. For most managers and staff this is a painful and seemingly pointless and unfair process largely driven by HRs obsessive need to have the paperwork completed and correctly filed.

In many organisations, the annual performance appraisal is a phenomenally stressful exercise with little discernible impact on results. If we’re going to manage and lead high performing organisations, we can’t afford to have performance appraisal “systems” that don’t affect performance.

Writing performance reviews for many of us is a memory feat of Derren Brown like proportions. Our intuition throws up a grading for an individual and then we trawl the recesses of our minds for incidents to justify it. And too often because our memory fails us we just play it safe with a ‘satisfactory’.

And if we do rate one of our reports as performing poorly then aren’t we just shooting ourselves in the foot? As the manager we are paid to manage performance – not just to report on it at the year end.

For many managers the difficulties of preparing and conducting effective performance reviews stems from two major causes:

  1. They have not documented enough of the performance management process through out the year – so they are forced to rely on memory. They have very limited notes on which to base their performance review. This means that often the annual review is actually heavily skewed towards performance in the most recent quarter – where evidence is near to hand and memory is reasonably fresh.
  2. They have not been close enough to performance throughout the year to really understand what any one individual has contributed to the success or otherwise of the team. They really don’t know who has been performing and who has not. They have not played a full and active role in either understanding and managing individual performance issues or in developing people to improve performance.

But all is not lost. There are things that you can do to make the preparation and delivery of performance reviews less stressful and more effective.

Through December and into the New Year PMN is running half day workshops in Leeds, Harrogate and Hull designed to help make the process of writing and delivering performance reviews more effective and less painful! Packed full of practical tips and useful tricks to make the process work more effectively and efficiently these workshops will help to make the performance review process much less of a headache.

You can find out more about the workshops here and can book your place on-line here

Congratulations to the Stop Hate UK Team

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I am currently training as a volunteer for STOP HATE UK who had their official launch in Leeds this afternoon. STOP HATE UK raises awareness and understanding of discrimination and hate crime, encourages its reporting, and supports the individuals and communities it affects.

It was really inspiring to listen to victims of hate crime talk about their experiences and describe the importance of the support that STOP HATE UK has been able to offer. I can’t wait to complete the training and start to get more involved.

But why do people hate in the first place? How could we engage with those who might become perpetrators of hate crime and prevent them from offending?

I am re-reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed which I first read when I did teacher training over 20 years ago. It reminds us that the oppressed, in turn, tend to become oppressors. My admittedly limited experience of hate crimes fits this pattern. The perpetrators are themselves victims of oppression both economically and socially. In order to find some power, status and esteem for themselves, they in turn oppress.

I believe that the same effect can play out in the workplace.  Old school managers strive to keep employees effective within roles that are tightly defined by job descriptions, targets, objectives and quality standards. The potential and aspiration of the individual comes a very distant second to their pre-ordained utility in the business.  Over time this distorts and inhibits their development as a human.  Essentially this style of management de-humanises and hatred, frustration, alienation and anger grow.  At best, people retire on the job.  At worst they express their alienation more powerfully through harassment, bullying and deception.

Progressive Managers on the other hand focus on the development of human potential.   Their role is to help people to exploit the opportunities that the organisation provides to further their own development as a person.  They build remarkable teams driven by the realisation of human potential – rather than the efficient but de-humanising fulfilment of a job description.

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Making it Easy to Say Thanks

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Sometimes saying thanks can be just too much work. You know you should drop someone a thank you card – but it is just too much effort to get to the shops and somehow it never gets done. So you just fire off an impersonal e-mail.

Instead, make it really easy to say ‘Thanks’ by setting up an emergency ‘Thank You’ kit. It should include some beautiful cards or notepaper, some postage stamps, and a selection of small but interesting gifts (I tend to give books or toys!). If you have to regularly thank chocolate loves you might want to look at this new service from Thorntons. (Big Thanks to Jayne Pickard from Encompass Marketing for the idea!)

You might also want to think about recording just how often you say thanks – and who to!

From Good to Great Manager – Part 2

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Great managers make people feel good about their work.

They catch people doing something right and thank them for it far more often they catch them doing something wrong. Affirming feedback outnumbers adjusting feedback by about 5:1.

They spend time with their team members observing them working and providing plenty of feedback and praise based on what they see. This is very different to many managers roles that are explicitly designed to ‘manage by exception’. ie the manager only gets involved when something has not gone as planned.

Great managers, when presented with ideas listen carefully for the tiniest germ of potential. Seizing that germ, they talk it through – teasing it, tweezing it, rearranging it – until the team member produces something workable.

Most importantly great managers make sure that team members know that their work is important.  That it makes a difference.  That they contribute.